2016 was one of the worst years for online hate
speech, a year when neo-fascists overwhelmed the comments sections of many
online forums. Members of the alt-right took popular platforms like Disqus,
Facebook and Twitter by storm, flooding them with hateful posts. They attempted
to reshape the debate on a wide range of issues including Brexit, Trump,
immigration and Islam. What's worse, in some ways they succeeded—and they’re
not done yet.

The alt-right represents a clear attempt to mould a
new popular consensus of contempt for minorities everywhere, including in
Germany where I’m based. For example, one study undertaken by the Anti-Defamation League found that 2.6 million
anti-Semitic tweets had been posted to Twitter by just 1,600 individuals in
2016 alone. Together, these anti-Semitic tweets were viewed around 10 billion times.

The study's authors noted that “Waves of
anti-Semitic tweets tend to emerge from closely connected online ‘communities.’ These
aggressors are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump
supporters, conservatives, or part of the ‘alt-right.’”

Source: Screenshot from 4Chan,
the anonymous online forum which helped to create the alt-right.

Alt-right websites such as Infostormer,
Daily Stormer (both currently
inaccessible) and Breitbart have been
instrumental in mobilizing right wing activists to popularise nationalistic
hate speech online, and are quite open about their intentions to alter the
status quo by passing off hate as acceptable—for example, by claiming that their statements are
nothing but a new brand of cutting-edge humour.

Andrew
Anglin, founder of alt-right website Daily Stormer, has
written that, “‘Gas the kikes’ is ridiculous enough that it will
immediately be recognized as humor.” He
also stated that he hopes “the media repeating this phrase would
desensitize the public to Holocaust humor.”

Presumably, this explains why his website’s
comments sections are drenched in racial slurs, misogyny and ‘comical’
suggestions about sending minorities to death camps. The problem is that these
comments aren’t just confined to right-wing sites—they have gradually spilled over
to the rest of the world’s online discussions. Since about 2012, the alt-right
has increasingly been targeting the comments sections of European websites.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking hate groups since 1971
and is one of the most comprehensive sources of information on the American
far-right. Its “hate map”
shows that most active groups are clustered around the Carolinas, Virginia,
Tennessee and Florida, but through the use of social media these groups have
managed to extend their reach enormously. Here
in Berlin, until recently one of the alt-right’s most popular hang-outs was the
comments section of the English language news site, The Local.

Since I first reported on this issue, the site has
removed virtually all the hate comments from its news section. However, one only
needs to enter terms like “thelocal.de” plus the address of any white
nationalist webpage into a search engine to see how often their articles have
been re-posted in right-wing backwaters.

Clearly, although this site is located
in Berlin it was seen as a significant target for these groups. One reason
was probably the access it provides to a European readership; another is its
use of the Disqus comment platform. Any website using Disqus usually
has a far higher proportion of hate speech because the platform is somewhat laissez-faire
about tackling fake users and their comments. While Facebook and Twitter have
recently begun removing fake news items and hate speech, Disqus has taken no such
action, though it did introduce user-blocking in June 2016—much to the chagrin
of right-wing users.

Source: Daily Stormer.

This is a startling reminder of why it's dangerous
for internet users to view comments sections on news sites and elsewhere on social
media as an objective reflection of society's views. Groups like the alt-right
are all too willing to manipulate that perception.

On the Daily Stormer for example, right-wing
activists can be found coordinating campaigns to carpet-bomb social platforms
like Twitter and Facebook and any major websites that use Disqus. Working in
tandem, these trolls manufacture ‘public’ outcries against minorities who’ve
upset them by speaking out against sexism in gaming, for example, or marrying
someone of another race.

From the kind of targets they pick, it seems logical to deduce that their own social group
consists almost entirely of white, straight, single and presumably Christian
men, since they tend to target everyone who falls outside those categories. The
alt-right will often pose as women, teenagers or black people so that other
users will be slower to identify them as neo-fascists, though their tendency to
post endless, self-hating rants against Black
Lives Matter and feminism gives them away pretty easily.

These activists are encouraged to create an
array of bogus identities by supplying Twitter and Disqus with dozens of fake
email accounts. In the process, each one transforms himself into a one-man
mob, ‘liking’ and reposting his own comments and chiming in with cut-and-pasted
replies. This is how many of the right-wing online echo chambers are born.

In
this screenshot, a poster on Daily Stormer explains how easy it is to manipulate
Disqus by creating fake accounts. This is one of the alt-right's favourite
tactics for fostering the illusion of mass support for its views.

The number of extreme right-wing comments on The
Local.de began to rise sharply in 2014—the same year that Chancellor Merkel
announced her open-borders policy for refugees. Merkel’s move was quickly congratulated
by President Obama, which seems to have acted as a starting gun for the alt-right
to begin seeding German websites with anti-refugee propaganda. Since then, a
legion of trolls have spent most of the day and night posting hateful comments
and scouring the internet for news stories involving refugees, immigrants or
Muslims which they share with their entourage of outraged sock puppets. If the
news outlets don’t oblige them by providing a juicy story, they’re happy to make
shit up.

A recent example occurred on Twitter at the end
of 2016 after a story about a young
woman who was kicked down the stairs at Berlin’s Neukoelln station appeared
online. The details of the story were quickly re-written so that the dark-skinned,
dark-haired female victim became a ‘blond-haired, blue-eyed German,’ while her
assailant—a Bulgarian citizen—was rebranded a ‘Muslim refugee.’ It was a
perfect example of how the alt-right aggressively tries to associate every
wrongdoing with one of the minority groups they hate, no matter how tenuous the
connection.

Source: twitter.

Thankfully, the alt right does not reflect the
majority of opinion in Germany, any more than they do in their American
homeland. Far-right membership in most Western countries has increased slightly over the last
three years, but there is still a chasm between the preponderance of hate
speech online and the amount of bigotry seen in real life (horrendous though
that is). In the 2015 World
Values Survey for example, between five per cent and 22 per cent of respondents in
Western countries demonstrated negative feelings towards people of colour,
immigrants, women, queers and other minorities. This stands in stark contrast
to the pattern seen on Disqus, where the majority of comments are prejudiced in
some way. Here is a sample of the Survey’s results from Germany and the USA:

Does not want a multiracial neighbour? Germany 14,8
per cent, United States 5.6 per cent
Does not want a migrant neighbour: Germany: 21.4 per cent, United States: 13.6
per cent
Thinks that a woman's rights to work comes second to a man's: Germany 15.5 per
cent, United states: 5.7 per cent.

Meanwhile, the German Verfassungschutz (or domestic intelligence unit) reported in
2015 that membership in far-right parties in Germany totaled just 11,800
people. Nevertheless, all media outlets have to realize that they can be and
are being manipulated. A sudden rise in comments against minorities is a sure
sign that the alt-right is at work. The problem is that any sign of high
traffic seems to be appreciated by many media editors and owners these days,
even if comes in the form of trolls spewing hate. After all, why look a gift
horse in the mouth?

The alt-right also counts on internet users
being in a hurry, searching for the most shocking tit-bits from their news-feeds
and passing them on to others without pausing to check the authenticity of the
source. The rise of fake news is a stark reminder that “The price of freedom
is eternal vigilance.”

The Deep South and its ultra-right minority may
be an ocean away from Europe, but the internet allows it to post its views
worldwide while assuming a local disguise. We should be wary of getting too
used to the alt-right's virtual presence in our lives: as events
in Charlottesville have shown us, it can quickly harden into something much
more real and damaging than words on a screen.

A.
E. Elliott has been bouncing back and forth between respectable media jobs and
disreputable underground parties for most of her adult life. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany,
where she has been publishing articles on counterculture and politics since 2012.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.